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The bleak outlook for liberalism - in all parties

Labour and the Conservatives have never been particularly hospitable
homes for their moderate, centrist members.
Corralled within an insulated party bubble consisting mainly of true
believers, the moderate members have often been regarded as potential betrayers,
consensual minded types who occasionally find common ground with their
opponents; worse, as people who seem too willing to question the orthodoxies of
their chosen tribe and challenge some of their heart-held beliefs. What kept them going was the belief that
their party leaderships, whatever they said in public, often shared their own
centrist, outward-reaching attitudes. In
a sense they had to, for how else could they expect to govern except with the
support of some of that part of the electorate which didn’t traditionally identify
with their party? So for decades in the past
century or so, the two parties were, for the most part, led by mainstream
centrists.

Since 1945, the Labour party has had only one exception to
this general rule until Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected victory; Michael Foot, who
presided over the disastrous defeat of 1983.
For the Conservatives, the story has been more mixed, as the era of One
Nation leadership came to an abrupt halt with Margaret Thatcher’s election as
leader in 1975. Her electoral success
was enabled by weak and divided opposition, but her leadership eventually
became too divided for the party’s parliamentary leadership and was brutally
shunted aside in favour of the more centrist John Major in 1990. Major’s appeal brought his party an extra
term in government, but his three successors ditched the appeal to moderation
and presided over two election defeats until the more One Nation oriented David
Cameron took over.

Even in their darkest times – the early 80s for moderate
Labourites, the noughties for moderate Tories – moderate members of each party
could take solace from both the possibility of a return to favour at the top,
and the knowledge that at least their opponents weren’t out and out
lunatics. A centrist Labour leadership
benefited from the Tory retreat into its right-wing laager in the noughties
just as David Cameron was able to see off the leftwards tilt of Ed
Miliband. Alas, no more.

If the liberal progressives in either party were tempted to
be despairing about the outcome of the Brexit referendum, that is as nothing
compared to the political landscape that looms before us in the 2017 general
election and its aftermath. Never has it
been such a bad time to be a moderate in politics. While Jeremy Corbyn exercises a complete
control over the Labour party on behalf of his left-wing supporting movement,
Momentum, Theresa May abandoned some time ago any attempt to face down her
right-wing in turn. Indeed, for all the
eloquence of her chief of staff’s speech writing in the early months, it is
difficult to discern a clear political vision from May, other than the need to
stay in power and bludgeon a hard Brexit through parliament whatever the
consequences. There is a small remnant
of moderate, independent minded MPs on the Tory benches, but they are unlikely
to be much enlarged by the influx of new Tory MPs on the back of this election.

It is a bleak picture, but is there some light to be had
from the direction of the Liberal Democrats?
Tim Farron has bounded fresh faced and energetic into the election and
his party has trumpeted over 5,000 new members since the election was
called. They may even pick up seats –
probably at the expense of Tory MPs in Remain-leaning southern metropolitan
seats, or traditionally liberal south-western ones. As nice as such a boost will be, they are
unlikely to reach their glory days of 60 plus MPs without further work in the
Labour strongholds of the north, and here it is more likely to be Tories – as in
Copeland – who take the prize.

Why has liberalism, the progressive attitude once prevalent
in all parties, reached such a dire state?

In essence liberalism has never been a far-reaching ideology
in populist terms. Labour’s brand of social liberalism was smuggled onto the
statute books by Roy Jenkins and his successors on the back of its more
populist electoral appeal to manual Britain for better wages and working
conditions, and better public services. Margaret
Thatcher’s economic liberalism came cloaked in populist attacks upon the
failures of social democracy, and then appeals to national identity (via the
Falklands and latterly Europe).

Progressive liberals always sought validation from the
establishment in power, and not from the people. The belief in a reasoned, consensual,
progressive building of a civilised state served by governments committed to at
least some aspects of the liberal cause wasn’t one easily sold in gut electoral
terms. But populism was always tearing
away at the fabric. Most people,
uninterested in politics and prepared to vote instinctively and emotively, and
once upon a time tribally, had no time for the finer aspects of political
debate and theorising. While the liberal
state delivered, this seemed fine, especially when each party had a core of
leaders committed to variations on the same project. Nevertheless, as turbulence swept the global
community, and mass migration became a feature, the fragile belief in a liberal
state that could both serve its people and extend magnanimity towards others
started to explode.

The incendiary devices for such resentment had long been
readily to hand in the form of the popular press. Once the liberal state stumbled in its
attempt to explain the impact of global trends that put indigenous workers out
of their jobs, and seemed to fail to arrest influxes of foreign workers to
occupy the lower reaches of the salary earning spectrum, the way was open for
the ever louder beat of nationalism.

It came from the right-wing press, and was quickly adopted
by politicians with an eye to the main chance.
It seems odd, in the age of social media and the generally accepted
ability of anyone and everyone to forge their own news sources via facebook,
blogs and twitter, to talk of the power of the press, but power it is. Few twitter accounts or facebook pages can
match the reach – even today – of traditional newspapers. Where social media is bifurcated and diverse,
newspapers still provide a common currency in news and opinion. In some respects, social media merely
amplifies this. A single front page in
the most powerful of the papers – the Mail or the Sun – can drive social media
comment for days. A largely mediocre
political class remains in thrall to the apparent and high profile power of
newspapers. The Telegraph had MPs on the
run for months over expenses a few years ago; Theresa May crafts her agenda
almost entirely to suit the Mail and the Sun today. And what makes these papers even more
powerful is their ability to dance to the otherwise inchoate beat of the nationalist
drum up and down the country.

Liberalism – the belief in reasoned, rational politics – is upended
today by the resurgent triumph of nationalism.
In a shrewd column recently, the Economist’s new Bagehot (Adrian Wooldridge)
identified the posthumous triumph of Enoch Powell’s vision for Britain (“Thethird man”). The party that succeeds, he
argued, would be the party that successfully articulated this ideal of a
national identity, and he further noted that Theresa May’s provincially rooted
Englishness seemed to have a far better chance of success than Labour’s messy,
divided party.

For the liberal, this is a most unappetising vision. Having successfully emerged from the last
wreckage of nationalist triumph in the first half of the twentieth century, securing
what seemed to be a permanent supra-national and liberal dominance, the
collapsing of that same hegemony, and the accompanying lack of confidence in
its future, is once again unleashing the darkest of political forces.

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